


The Urresh Puzzle

by Fairleigh



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alien Biology, Alien/Human Relationships, Getting Together, M/M, Medical Kink, Mpreg, Science Fiction, Second Chances, Sexual Content, Worldbuilding, Xeno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-30
Updated: 2020-06-30
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:53:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,065
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24507973
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fairleigh/pseuds/Fairleigh
Summary: When the last living member of an little-known alien species walks through his office door, a disgraced doctor is given a chance to find redemption ... and possibly true love.
Relationships: Male Last Member of an Alien Species That Can Get Mpregnant By Any Species/Male Human, Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Comments: 4
Kudos: 48
Collections: Fandom 5K 2020





	The Urresh Puzzle

**Author's Note:**

  * For [greygerbil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greygerbil/gifts).



Frank pulled up his next patient’s file without actually bothering to glance at it. “Next,” he called out, his voice carrying easily from his small office to the waiting room just beyond the flimsy partition.

A male Gracie slid into the office and took the only empty seat available. A male Gracie? Hm, that was odd. Usually it was the anxious females who visited him on his OB-GYN days.

“You’re here for a gynecological appointment, correct? Mr. … uh …” Frank checked the top line of the patient file — a new patient, he now belatedly noticed. “Mr. Pfam Kuan? Am I pronouncing that right?”

The Gracie tilted his head to the right, Gracien body language signaling agreement. “Yes, Dr. Pratt. And please, just call me Kuan.”

“Very well. How may I help you today, Kuan?”

Kuan hesitated before stiffening in the chair, as if gathering his courage. “I’m in need of reproductive advice, Dr. Pratt.”

Frank’s eyebrows made a break for his (lamentably receding) hairline. He was reasonably certain that the six words, ‘I’m in need of reproductive advice,’ had never before been uttered by the vocal apparatus of a male Gracie. Male Gracie were, after all, prolific polygynous breeders who made no paternal investment in their many offspring beyond the act of impregnation. The Gracie sex ratio stood at 49.1 females for each male, and even on remote outposts like Statin Six, males hardly lacked for female partners. Frank’s consistently large cohort of currently pregnant female Gracie patients was testament to that.

But none of this was anything Kuan needed to know. “I’m afraid you’ll have to be more specific,” Frank said instead. “And, while please be aware that I will endeavor to assist you to the best of my abilities, as you can see I am not myself a Gracie. It may be that your medical needs would be better served by —”

“That’s the thing, Dr. Pratt!” Kuan interrupted, leaning forward in the chair, head tilted to the left to signal his disagreement. “I’m not a Gracie.” He paused, head straightening. “Well, my father is a Gracie, but my mother wasn’t, and neither am I.”

Frank eyed Kuan with skepticism. He had the almond eyes, ovoid head, four arms, and serpentine torso and tail of a Gracie. He had a male Gracie’s violet and blue coloring. Though technically employed as Statin Six’s General Medical Practitioner (GMP, MD), Frank was an obstetrician by training. If Kuan was suffering from some sort of delusion, Frank did not have the background in psychiatry to deal with it —

“I’m not a Gracie. I’m an Urresh,” Kuan clarified.

~*~*~

Frank was home for the evening and free to do as he liked in the privacy of his medical officer’s quarters until the start of his next shift tomorrow morning. It’d been yet another long and irritating day at the office, a mixture of the usual phantom aches and pains and anxious pregnant women, one after another after another. Frank settled himself down on his sofa with a mug of hot rooibos tea and a tablet, planning to jerk off to porn before bed.

Instead of porn, though, he found himself calling up the search engine for the Consolidated XenoGenetics Database to run a subject-level search for anything that had been written about the Urresh. He’d had to put Kuan off while he looked into the matter, instructing him to make a follow up appointment in a week’s time. Urresh was not a species name Frank was familiar with, and the CXGD was his usual first port of call in moments of medical uncertainty. But his keyword search returned one lonely result: an unpublished working paper by Gang Sshyi.

 _Sshyi_ , of all people in the known universe. Ugh, that was some very bad juju right there. Frank tossed the tablet aside, covered his face with an arm, and closed his eyes. He didn’t have the energy to deal with this tonight, he decided. Perhaps heading straight to bed was the better option.

Once upon a time, a whole lifetime ago, Frank Pratt had been a rising star in the medical field, and he’d won a coveted postdoctoral fellowship with the Obstetrics Lab of the U.N. Xenogenetics Unit. He was so, so sure that fellowship would be the first step on the ladder leading upwards to the rest of his soon-to-be-legendary professional life, and he fully expected to running his own lab within ten years. That for the first year ever the fellowship had been awarded to two candidates instead of the normal one did not deter him in the least.

Until, that is, he met Gang Sshyi.

Sshyi was a Gracie, member of an unimportant alien species from the outskirts of mapped colonial space. She was also female, which for the Gracie meant that she was the lesser of the two biological sexes. They were like humans used to be about women, only worse. She had undoubtedly had to overcome significant challenges to get to where she was, and once she did get there, she was the only Gracie, not just in the lab but in the entire unit.

She kept herself to herself, mostly. Didn’t hang out. Didn’t socialize afterhours. Didn’t go out drinking with the rest of the postdocs — alcohol was toxic to Gracie physiology. And really, Frank and the rest probably weren’t as welcoming to an outsider as they could have been.

And that was probably how it would have stayed, had Sshyi not been quite so exceptional. She was insanely productive, churning out new research at several times the rate of anyone else in the lab, including Frank. This productivity became a source of gossip: Did her four arms give her some sort of biological advantage? But no, Gracie were no better at multitasking than humans. Was she secretly paying other people to do her work for her? But no, the quality of all of those papers were both consistent and consistently high.

Or were they? Frank felt his hoped for future threatened. At this rate, Sshyi would be head of the lab, not him! He began fomenting false rumors about her integrity; he made bad faith arguments in anonymous peer review forums rebutting her conclusions. Did you know that she just invents her field data? No way! Yes way! I mean, c’mon, who’s gonna actually go to Statin Six to verify the authenticity of her data? Impugning Sshyi went swimmingly well, at least at first, and it’d been so _easy_. Frank had a good reputation, _and he was human_ , whereas Sshyi was aloof, her productivity making her easy to resent. The other researchers in his field, especially the other humans, who tended to occupy the most prestigious and powerful positions, were already predisposed to believe him over her.

And believe him they did. Sentiment turned against her. Everyone was so completely certain Sshyi was a fraud, a fucking dirty alien angling to take parasitical advantage of the greatest research institutions humanity had to offer. The mob was screaming for her head. Frank readied the _coup de grace_. He had proof, he said — definitive proof — that she had lied to the ethics review board! Gang Sshyi was a liar and fraud, and worst of all? She lacked even the integrity to honestly promise not to harm her research subjects!

That was a bridge too far. An outsider — a Gracie woman! — had put good, honest human beings in danger! Sshyi’s writings and field data were seized, and her ongoing experiments were shuttered. Sshyi herself was taken into custody by law enforcement. Frank bought himself a thirty-year-old bottle of wine to celebrate the destruction of his number one rival’s career.

But he’d declared victory too soon; a thorough U.N. audit found no wrongdoing, and whatever honest differences of opinion there were about her conclusions were simply the usual thrust and parry of knowledge creation. Frank’s lies were found out, and he was ejected from the Obstetrics Lab in disgrace while Sshyi was reinstated to the fellowship without prejudice … and given Frank’s old duties and privileges to boot.

Frank struggled to find work after that. Plum job offers were mysteriously withdrawn. In the end, the only position he could find was in a General Medical Practitioner’s office on the ass-back of nowhere a.k.a. Statin Six. And Statin Six was in the Gracie system. _Sshyi’s_ home planet. Was that irony for you, or what? Just in case Frank was about to forget what a fuck-up he was, every new day at work and every patient he saw seemed expressly designed to remind him.

He didn’t generally sleep well, needless to say. Too many nightmares.

So there he was at 3 A.M. with his tablet on night mode and reading a working paper on “Urresh: Preliminary observations from a rural obstetrics practice” by GANG, Sshyi:

_… remnant of a spacefaring species, a founder population on Statin Six of a few hundred individuals …_

_… survived for three centuries by interbreeding with the native Gracie …_

_… hybrid offspring are Gracie if female, Urresh if male, with a skewed female:male ratio of approximately 50:1 …_

_… Urresh ability to reliably hybridize with the Gracie requires further research …_

_… skewed gender ratio would suggest that, absent sustained therapeutic intervention, the Urresh as a species are on a fast track to extinction …_

OK, Frank thought he was starting to get a good idea of why Kuan had come to his office in need of reproductive advice. Something was nagging at him, though, and he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. But since he’d definitely made some progress on the work front, he decided to reward himself with some late-night livestream porn and a jerk off session.

He was in the midst of beating the proverbial meat when he realized: Kuan had said that he was Urresh on his _mother’s_ side. If hybrid offspring are Gracie if female and Urresh if male, how would that be possible? It was a puzzle. Frank liked a puzzle.

He finished with a nice load less than a minute later and fell asleep shortly after that, sleeping soundly and dreamlessly until daybreak.

~*~*~

A week later, and Kuan had returned to Frank’s office. His answers to Frank’s questions did work to clear some things up, but they also raised a whole host of new questions that Kuan could not answer. Frank felt like a detective trying to solve a mystery, and he couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so intellectually stimulated.

“Let me just check that I’ve got this straight,” Frank said as he checked over his notes. “Your mother was by all appearances a phenotypical male Gracie, and yet he … she … he …?” Frank paused, unsure.

“He,” Kuan confirmed.

“ _He_ was bred in the usual way by another male Gracie, became pregnant, and gave birth to you?”

“Yes. Well. That’s what I was told.” Kuan’s tail twitched with embarrassment. “I wasn’t there … or, uh, I guess I was _there_ , but I don’t remember it.”

“And your mother — he raised you?”

“Yes. Until he was returned to the land eight years ago.”

Frank sighed. It was unfortunate — a suspicious soul might say unfortunately _convenient_ — that Kuan’s mother was deceased. Traditional Gracie funerary rites involved returning the deceased’s body to the land, which in practice meant exposing the body outdoors, available to be eaten by scavengers and/or to otherwise decompose. If anything remained after a full lunar cycle, and often nothing did, that would be burnt and cremated, the ashes scattered to the winds. Had this been Frank’s home planet Earth, it probably would’ve been possible to posthumously exhume and examine the body. But on Statin Six? Nah, not a chance.

On the other hand, male Gracie _never_ played any role in the raising of offspring. Children were raised solely by their mother, and if the mother died or became otherwise indisposed, the children would be left to fend for themselves. Which was, effectively, a death sentence. For a phenotypical male Gracie to be raising a child — it’d be the talk of the _planet_. So Frank figured the basic outlines of Kuan’s biography would be easy enough to verify independently if it came to that. Still, scientific curiosity and all, he had to ask: “What did the neighbors think?”

Kuan’s lower set of arms twisted. “They were polite but distant. We shared a father, of course, so …”

Ah, of course. Frank nodded. In the context of a single neighborhood, one male was likely to have fathered most if not all of the similarly aged children, and it was taboo for the families of these half-siblings to come into open conflict.

“They knew we were Urresh, though, so I guess they were used to my mother being around.”

“And he never explained the circumstances of your conception?”

Kuan looked sad. “Other than to say the things every kid wants to hear? That my father was the strongest, best looking male on the whole eastern continent, that no one could possibly resist his charms? No, he never explained how Urresh reproduction worked. Maybe if I’d been older before he was returned to the land …”

So. It was a puzzle. Kuan’s mother, and his mother before him, had been Urresh, and as far as Kuan was aware, he was the very last member of his species. As such, he felt he had a moral responsibility to ensure that the Urresh did not die out, and Frank was happy to agree that this reasoning was meritorious. The only problem? Kuan, by all appearances a phenotypical male Gracie, didn’t know how to get pregnant. Dr. Pratt to the rescue?

“Have you ever tried to father children in the usual way?” he asked.

Kuan’s tail began twitching violently. The question must’ve made him want to die of embarrassment. “The females … they say … they say I don’t smell right,” he mumbled to the floor.

“Hmm.” Gracie of both sexes used pheromones to signal their readiness to breed. The usual phrase they used was “to smell ready” or, conversely, “to smell unready.” Saying that Kuan didn’t “smell right” would imply a serious health problem interfering with fertility and/or the genetic viability of offspring … if Frank hadn’t already known that Kuan wasn’t even the same species as the females rendering this judgment! And really, was it any serious surprise that a Urresh wouldn’t “smell right” to a Gracie?

“So can you help me, Dr. Pratt?” Kuan asked plaintively.

Frank leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath. Honestly? He didn’t know, and he didn’t want to give false assurances. He didn’t traffic in lies anymore, not after everything that’d happened with Sshyi. “I’ll have to run some tests,” he said instead.

Too bad most of the tests he’d have liked to have run weren’t possible, given the resources available to him on Statin Six. Argh, if only the equipment weren’t so primitive! He took a blood sample — not that he could run any especially interesting xenogenetic analyses of said blood sample from the ass-back of nowhere, so it would half to be sent out — and he took some x-rays of Kuan’s abdominal cavity. And since he saw nothing on the x-rays besides the smudges and shadows of the organs of a healthy male Gracie, he rounded things off with an ultrasound.

The ultrasound machine would’ve been in either a garbage dump or a museum on Earth. One of Frank’s peers from two hundred years in the past would’ve immediately recognized it for what it was and known how to use it. But sometimes obsolete methods were the best one could manage, and ultrasound had become a primary tool of Frank’s OB-GYN trade.

He started with the ultrasound wand against Kuan’s bare torso, looking for female reproductive organs or anything else which might rate as outside normal range for a male Gracie. He found nothing. He pushed the wand harder into Kuan’s flesh. Nope, nothing. “I don’t see anything,” he said, probably unnecessarily, “but sometimes it’s hard to get good resolution through the abdominal wall. We could attempt a transcloacal ultrasound if you’re comfortable with that, but a lot of patients aren’t, and honestly I’m not sure it’ll matter —”

“No, do it,” Kuan interrupted, head tilted to the right — agreement. “Anything that might help, Dr. Pratt.”

Male Gracie did not have penises. They did not, in fact, have any external genitalia whatsoever to distinguish them from females. Instead, male Gracie, like female Gracie, had only a single, modest, forward-facing orifice which was used for all of the usual excretory as well as sexual and reproductive functions. Copulation was achieved by the transfer of a packet of sperm from male to female when the two orifices touched, the cloacal “kiss.” The Gracie, unlike humans, did not associate sex with penetration, and the cloaca was not ordinarily meant to be penetrated. A transcloacal ultrasound was therefore invasive. Frank knew he would have to be gentle to avoid injuring Kuan.

“OK,” Frank said as he applied a liberal coat of gel to the ultrasound wand. Gracie cloacas were self-lubricating, but it never hurt to be extra careful. “I want you to try to relax and focus on your breathing. We’ll take this as slowly as you need. If I’m hurting you, you tell me, and I’ll stop. Understood?”

“I understand, Dr. Pratt,” Kuan said. His light gray eyes, like liquid silver mixed with water, were fixed trustingly on Frank’s face.

“OK, Kuan. Try to relax,” Frank reminded him as he began to push the head of the wand against Kuan’s cloaca. There was resistance, of course, but inevitably it yielded, and the head of the wand was inside. Kuan shuddered convulsively in response to the unaccustomed intrusion, and Frank froze. “OK?” Frank asked. Kuan shuddered again and tilted his head to the right. “Remember — if you tell me it hurts I’ll stop.” Frank resumed his gentle pushing, and the wand began to slide in deeper.

He started watching the screen. The male Gracie’s twin pairs of gonads were in the usual positions, and subtly adjusting the angle of the wand, once, twice, thrice, allowed him to see all four testes individually. They appeared anatomically normal. The other associated glands did as well. Hmm. But perhaps there were other, _unexpected_ internal features? A uterus, say? Or other vestigial organs? Or perhaps some other anatomical evidence of Kuan’s hybrid ancestry? In pursuit of a clearer picture, Frank pushed the wand in a centimeter or so deeper. Nothing. He adjusted the angle. Still nothing. He adjusted the angle again. Nope —

“Ahhhh! Dr. Pratt!” Kuan whimpered. His tail twitched and slapped the examination table — embarrassment — the sudden movement causing the ultrasound wand to shift within him and out of position.

Frank froze his movements and turned from the screen to check on Kuan. Kuan was flushed, hemocyanin staining his face, throat, and chest a deep azure blue, and his gaze was not trained on the screen, as was the case for most expectant mothers whom Frank had treated. Instead, he was looking intently at Frank himself. At first, Frank was confused; this was not a normal Gracie pain response. Hell, if he didn’t know better, he’d think Kuan was sexually aroused, which … oh. _Oh_.

Now _Frank_ was the one who was becoming flushed. “I … I, uh, I don’t see anything unusual,” Frank said, trying to conceal his discomfiture. The situation was inappropriate; he was a medical professional! “If you take a look at the screen” — he readjusted the ultrasound wand so that it was correctly angled once more — “you can see one of your testes here. See the smooth outlines? That means there’s no scarring, cysts, polyps, anything like that. The other three look the same.” Gently, he eased the ultrasound wand out of Kuan’s cloaca and set it aside. “In other words, on the basis of an ultrasound, I’d say that you were a healthy male Gracie.”

Kuan deflated, his disappointment evident, but with his modest Gracie genitalia he had plausible deniability. Frank pretended not to notice how he was still trembling.

“I’ll give you a moment in private to get dressed and get yourself together,” Frank said, “but I’m afraid I have another patient with an appointment on the top of the next hour. He removed his examination gloves and gave Kuan’s shoulder a companionable pat. “I’m going to have your blood sample shipped to a specialist lab on Earth, so I expect it’ll be a while before any results come back. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear anything.”

~*~*~

It was downright laughable how little Frank was able to do to help Kuan with what he’d come to him for: reproductive advice. Nothing he’d done had even been successful in independently verifying Kuan as an Urresh, and if he couldn’t say with certainty what species Kuan was, realistically, what medically sound advice could he offer?

“Have you heard anything yet, Dr. Pratt?” Kuan asked. He was standing in the doorway to Frank’s office. This was the third day in a row that he’d come around to inquire.

“No, Kuan.” Frank sighed and rubbed his eyes tiredly. “I told you I’d let you know as soon as I heard anything, and since I haven’t contacted you, that would mean —”

“You haven’t heard anything,” Kuan said, finishing Frank’s sentence for him.

“Exactly.”

As far as Frank was concerned, today’s conversation with Kuan was over. He turned his attention back to checking the latest set of patient x-rays. Yep, exactly what he’d thought. Cracked rib. Nothing unexpected or out of the ordinary. When he looked up, though, about to call the patient with the cracked rib back into his office, he realized Kuan was still loitering.

“Kuan.”

The snow-white tip of Kuan’s tail flicked, an unusual gesture which was a sign of either anticipation or anxiety. Or possibly both, come to think of it. “Yes?”

Frank sighed again. “Don’t you have someplace else you have to be?”

Now his tail was twitching properly — embarrassment. “Not … not really.”

Hmm. That made sense, actually. Most young males in their prime would be busy with the females in their territory and living off of their collective largesse, but Kuan had said that he didn’t “smell right” to females, so he did not have recourse to the usual male Gracie diversions. Frank sighed a third time. “Well, don’t just stand there. If you’re planning on hanging out, then I’m going to put you to work. Understood?”

The warmth of Kuan’s facial expression could only be called a smile. “Understood, Dr. Pratt!”

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending upon your point of view, there was plenty of work to be done. Frank worked alone in the office without any nursing staff. There was no secretary. No receptionist either. He normally did _everything_ himself.

He started Kuan off small, giving him control of the appointment book and a mountain of old patient files to sort. Kuan was both eager and efficient, and he had the office files sorted and shelved more nicely than they’d ever been within a week. After that, he took it upon himself to clean and disinfect the office from top to bottom. But since regular thorough floor moppings and the scheduling of appointments still left Kuan relatively little to do throughout the day, Frank started, with his patients’ permission as relevant, allowing Kuan to sit in on his appointments, teaching him bits of medicine on the fly.

The days with Kuan seemed to pass quickly. For the first time since taking the job on Statin Six, Frank was actively _enjoying_ his work. He liked teaching Kuan, he realized. He enjoyed their discussions of possible diagnoses and courses of treatment; Kuan’s insightful observations and thoughtful questions were helping to keep him sharp. And before the month was out, Kuan had, for all intents and purposes, become a proper doctor’s assistant.

“I suppose I ought to start paying you a salary,” Frank had found himself saying on more than one occasion and not really meaning it as a joke. Problem was, there just wasn’t the income or funding for an assistant — that was why he didn’t have one in the first place.

“You shouldn’t have to pay me if I’m enjoying myself,” Kuan would always say in reply.

And that was obviously true; Kuan’s enjoyment was self-evident. But Frank should definitely have realized that Kuan’s enjoyment wasn’t limited to the learning or the unique, uh, pleasures of Frank’s eminent medical professional company. Said realization was unequivocally driven home when, at the end of the sixth week of Kuan’s informal employment at the General Medical Practitioner’s office, he found Kuan using the ultrasound machine unsupervised.

And it wasn’t just that he was using it, though that would have been bad enough. The machine was an important piece of medical equipment, and if it got broken beyond Frank’s personal ability to repair it, it would not be replaced. Nor was it that Kuan was using it unsupervised, which was even worse, given that he wasn’t qualified to operate it, let alone interpret the resultant images. No, it was _how_ he was using it.

While lying on the examination table. Transcloacally, with the wand pressed deep inside of him. Flushed azure and moaning. “Mmm, Dr. Pratt, yes, _yes_ , give it to me … deeper, yes, _deeper_ … I want to feel you everywhere …”

Kuan was moaning _for Frank_. The sight and the sound were beautiful and intensely erotic, and Frank knew he was developing a serious problem in his pants.

“Ahem.” Frank cleared his throat loudly to announce his presence.

Kuan froze, expression pinched with fear. He hastily removed the ultrasound wand from himself and got up off of the table. There was no plausible deniability, no misunderstanding what he had been doing. “Dr. Pratt,” he started, “I … I’m sorry, I —”

“I’m closing up the office for the evening,” Frank interrupted. He kept his tone of voice calm, even, professional. “Would you care to join me for dinner in my quarters, Kuan? I do believe there are some things of a personal nature we ought to discuss, and I would prefer to do that in a more comfortable setting.”

“I … I … yes, Dr. Pratt!” Kuan’s silver eyes shone brightly with hope.

“You can call me Frank, you know,” Frank said softly.

“Yes, Frank!”

~*~*~

In the end, they didn’t have dinner together that night. They didn’t have much in the way of a serious discussion either.

In fact, they barely made it back to Frank’s quarters, and the door hadn’t even latched itself automatically shut before Frank had Kuan’s back pressed up against the nearest wall, Kuan’s swollen entrance seeming to kiss the length of Frank’s erection as he rubbed it against the ring of muscle.

When he pushed inside and began to thrust, he didn’t have the wherewithal to be gentle, but Kuan didn’t seem to mind. His tail curled possessively around Frank’s ankle, and his four arms embraced Frank as Frank continued to pound furiously in and out, in and out, in and out. The slickness, the wetness, the tightness — they were all beyond perfection — and when he did finally come, mind blank and growling with each delicious, spurting contraction, it never even occurred to him to pull out.

When Kuan achieved completion moments later, his cry was transcendent, and he acted as if his every wish had just been granted.

~*~*~

All in all, it was an awfully nice arrangement: Frank and Kuan worked hard in the office during the day. Then they’d go home together in the evening and play hard until bedtime. Then they’d wake up curled around each other and do it all over again the next day.

And thus it continued for months and may well have continued indefinitely had Frank not noticed the change while indulging one night in some post-coital cuddling. “Would you just look at this belly,” he murmured with teasing affection, stroking the newly rounded swell of Kuan’s midsection. “Why, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were pregnant!”

Kuan sat up. The tip of his tail flicked at Frank’s toes beneath the covers. His head tilted right, then left, then right again. “I think … I think maybe I _am_ pregnant,” he said at last.

An ultrasound — transabdominal, this time, not transcloacal — was needed to confirm it.

Frank was staggered. Kuan had a uterus that hadn’t been there the first time he’d performed the ultrasound. And as for the fetus? Well, the features were unmistakable. One set of arms, not two, and _legs_. It looked _human_ , at a stage of development consistent with twelve weeks. Frank couldn’t quite make out any genitalia, but he had a sneaking suspicion the fetus would be male.

And when he bothered to consult the ultrasound images resulting from Kuan’s, uh, unsupervised session with the ultrasound wand some three months prior, he realized that he could see evidence of a vestigial uterus in those images. Or not vestigial, rather. _In development_.

Kuan’s feelings of attraction to Frank must have initiated a chemosignaling cascade which initiated the physiological changes necessary for him to breed successfully — with Frank himself. It was the only logical explanation.

When the results of the blood sample Frank had sent off to be analyzed finally came in a few days later, they gave him the independent confirmation he had sought: _Hybrid Gracie (male) + Urresh,_ it said, _with Urresh chromosomes inactivated._ Frank was not terribly surprised to find a note from Gang Sshyi, now Head of the U.N. Xenogenetics Unit, appended. The long and short of it was that she wanted to know more. She’d thought the Urresh already extinct on Statin Six and wondered if she and Frank might not work together to help ensure the preservation of this rare and exceptional species.

Frank was tempted not to reply to the contact address Sshyi had provided, sorely tempted indeed. But then he thought of his beautiful, beloved Kuan and the beautiful human-like fetus incubating in Kuan’s new uterus and changed his mind. Frank’s old animosities weren’t Kuan’s fault. Maybe, after all these years, he could work toward burying the hatchet.

 _Dear Dr. Gang,_ he wrote. _Congratulations on your promotion to Head of Xenogenetics. I write to you now as a colleague in the field and am pleased to report that I may have insight to offer with respect to Urresh reproductive processes and capacities …_


End file.
